Slashdot Mirror
Net: Now Our Most Serious News Medium?
Even heads of state get the significance of the Net these days. So-called "serious" journalists had been dumping every imaginable rumor - that the State Department had blown up, that crop-dusting planes were about to shower us with anthrax live on the air without any filtering or substantiation. It seemed to me that, unlike any previous big story, the Net had become the place where people were going for more accurate information -- including all kinds of content unavailable in most traditional media.
Who would ever have thought that George W. Bush would do his primary fund-raising appeal before Congress and the public by announcing a url: libertyunite.org? Or that British Prime Minister Tony Blair would publish the evidence against Osama Bin-Laden on a government Web site? Bush's advisers grasped the fund-raising potential of the Net, and Blair realized it is a new way to reach the world, including remote, even hostile corners.
The Net was not only the source of heavy traffic to conventional news sites like Cnn.com, Usatoday.com or the Washington Post/New York Times sites. Literally thousands of new sites sprouted information -- there are way too many to list here -- offering information on the tragedy itself and its survivors, working for disaster relief, presenting discussions about the Taliban and Afghanistan, Islam, Arab resentment against the United States.These news sites were a source of clarity and accuracy for many millions of people, puzzled or frightened by alarmist reports on TV and elsewhere. People posted video online from the disaster site, and broke important news online of the plane attacks, the building's collapse, and the rescue. It were these accounts that reported for the first time that planes had had hit the tower, that the towers had fallen, that there there were likely to be few survivors in the rubble. Two sites I saw were devoted to airline passengers stranded in hotel rooms all over the country seeking information on alternative forms of travel. And it was on the Net, on the Onion's terrific site that the first witty, tasteful and necessary media and political spoofs of the response to the tragedy were pulled off.
Many more sites devoted themselves to personal testimony: from people who saw the disaster, who were sending e-mail news dispatches to friends, who sought to clarify rumors or post accounts, who needed to discuss how they felt about the new "war."
Transcripts of 911 calls from the World Trade Center are posted online, as are the transcripts of reports by Islamic and Arab TV news organizations. This new kind of personal reporting offers an invaluable archive of a global tragedy. In the understandable patriotic frenzy that followed the attacks, it was on the Net that dissenters, peace activists and privacy advocates first surfaced, not the mainstream media. The Net has thus become a bulwark against the one dimensional view of events and the world that characterize Big Media. All points of view appeared, and instantly.
This kind of in-depth discussion and information was rarely available in conventional media -- on CNN and other sites, activists in Arab nations directly debated and talked with Americans, for example, something never before possible in media, which has neither the air time, space, resources, or inclination. Newspapers publish much too infrequently to compete seriously for long on a breaking story like this, with either TV or the Net. (An exception: localized cases like New York or Washington, where coverage in daily papers, particularly the New York Times and The Washington Post, was important and thorough).
Big media, already fragmenting, appears to be dividing this way:
- Commercial TV is a medium of images and entertainment. Nobody, certainly not the Net at this point, can compete with TV's ability to present powerful imagery live, from the plane attacks to speeches before Congress to Ground Zero to the aftermath to global reaction and soon, military conflict. In fact, TV arguably transmits powerful images too often and for too long, creating an emotional, almost hysterical climate around big stories even when there?s no news to report.
- Cable TV is the medium of political argument and confrontation. Channels like Fox, CNN and MSNBC are institutional media, the place where politicians and lobbyists gather to press their viewpoints, talk indirectly with other leaders elsewhere, share insider information and float options and ideas. These media are striking in their overwhelming tilt towards officials, bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicians and academics. You can watch them for days and not hear from average people, beyond the silly handful of calls or e-mails they occasionally cite.
- The Net offers not only breaking news -- mainstream media companies all have sophisticated websites -- but is the medium of individual expression and additional, more in depth information. Instant message systems played a crucial role in transmitting information, both accurate and false, especially in and near the disaster sites. IM will almost surely become a dominant and significant information source in the future, especially as it moves beyond college campuses and networked companies.
But for all the mainstream media phobias about the dangerous or irresponsible Net, it's seemed increasingly clear in the weeks since the attacks that the Net has become our most serious medium, the only one that offers information consumers breaking news and discussions, alternative points of view. Sadly, the Net seems to be the favored medium of the terrorists who planned the attacks as well. (Countless sites sprung up to detail what Islam is really about, and how diverse opinions in the Arab world are at play in this disaster).
It's the medium of personal expression -- people e-mailed friends and relatives to tell them they were okay, to get relief information, to volunteer time and money. And, of course, unlike conventional media, which still give ordinary citizens little or no opportunity to participate, the Net is architecturally and viscerally interactive. Feedback and individual opinion are not ghettoized in op-ed pages or in a handful of "we-want-to-hear-from-you" (no, they don't) phone calls, but are an integral part of Net information dispersal, it's core.
The Net has had its ups and downs in recent months. It's still beset by intrusive regulators, eager law enforcement officials and greedy dot.com entrepreneurs and corporate interests who want its profits but not its values. It's still going through a shaky phase economically. But the WTC attacks remind us of the extraordinary openness, open distribution of information and sense of community-building that are the heart of the wired world's promise.
... because most people were stuck at their desks and had no radio nearby (or was disruptive to other employees). Once we got a a TV in a conference room, people dropped the net for TV. You see, the net can be hacked, and articles found on the net (unless they are from reliable news sources, a la cnn, ap, reuters) aren't very trusted. TV is still the most reliable and trusted media.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What about the fact that every major news site in the U.S. and Canada collapsed under the load of Sept. 11? It was several hours before CNN was back up, and then in a bandwidth-limited form. I got most of my info from the BBC and Australian sites, and even those were very heavily loaded. Meanwhile, anywhere that there was a TV on Sept. 11 was tuned to CNN, which provided the breaking news as it happened -- and since that date, the principals have all appeared on television to describe their positions, not the internet. It seems premature to proclaim a new era of Internet news reporting.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
As a "cyber-journalist" I suppose it is understandable that you laud the WWW as the great new thing (TM)... But mainstream WWW sites were totally unreachable (Slashdot was an exception, but most people don't know slashdot, they know msnbc.com and abcnews.com). I would argue that the real landmark was email, which came through and proved its worth that day. When the phone systems collapsed thousands, if not millions of people frantically got in touch with loved ones to inform them of their safety via email (after 4 hours of "circuit not available" messages, I eventually contacted both my sister and my cousin this way).
Don't get me wrong, I love Slashdot, but as an example of the independent news the Net has to offer, one can't help but come to the conclusion that CNN and its TV-based family will continue to be the norm for a long, long time.
September 11th was a great example of this. When the fit really hit the shan, all the major news sites got slammed, failed, and people went back to watching CNN, MSNBC, or whatever.
Yes, there are plenty of inspirational stories of independent websites helping to feed the public's quest for more information, but these are in the minority. Joe Sixpack and his grandmother still relied on good ol' television to find out what happened.
Is the net a serious news source. Certainly not. Not yet anyway.
Got Rhinos?
It's true that the Net offers better immediate news than TV and radio (with the possible exception of NPR) these days. But for long-term, in-depth analysis, I still rely on that oh-so-retro source, the newspaper, for three reasons:
1. There's a level of fact-checking in print journalism that doesn't exist in any other news source. I'm not claiming that newspaper reporters never make mistakes, by any means, but I get the strong feeling that the information they provide is more accurate by an order of magnitude than anything that comes out of my TV, radio, or computer.
2. Generally, when we commit words to paper, we feel that they have more import than if we speak them or type them on a computer, and thus we are more careful about what we say. Newspaper articles in the wake of the 11 September attacks were much less overheated and emotional than reporting from any other source.
3. Similarly, reading something on paper is a fundamentally different experience from hearing it on the radio, watching it on TV, or reading it on screen. I can read and reread at my own pace, thinking carefully about the information I'm taking in, which I can't do with CNN. And newspapers hold my attention, unlike the Net where something different is only a mouse click away.
Don't get me wrong here -- I very much like the instant access to information I get on the Net, and I do get an increasing amount of my information there. But until both Net journalism and the experience of receiving it are up to print standards -- and they aren't, by a long shot -- the newspaper will remain my primary source for the information I use to shape my views on world events.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
2: Print - the best researched and most respected news is still carried out by folks like the WSJ, Washington Post, etc.
3: Radio - radio continues to feature in-depth reporting, although much more dumbed down than in print sources.
DEAD LAST: TV - the boob tube continues to be the news source for the illiterate, with the maximum amount of information transmitted to be contained in a two minute blurb. Everything Chomsky says about TV news is true. This is the gutter of information and news.
Ok, are we going to read the same thing after every US tragedy? Oklahoma City was the Internet's "proving ground," Columbine was the Internet's "proof of usefulness," Monica Lewinsky was evidence of the Internet's "advantages of traditional media." Every tragedy produces comments like this, but the Web is 10 years old now - the Internet became mainstream 4 or 5 years ago, at the latest. People know what the 'net offers, it doesn't take a disaster to "prove" it again.
Conventional journalists are still obsessed with hackers and pornographers; still fuss about whether the Net is safe or factual. But increasingly, they steer readers to their websites for more in-depth information and conversation.
Unfortunately, the mainstream news sites are almost all that remain. ABCNews.com and cnn.com are our most important sources of information online, but does that change anything? It leaves information in the hands of the monopolistic communications behemoths and gives them an excuse to provide less coverage through their traditional print and broadcast outlets.
"Freest and most diverse" my ass. Independent sites like The Industry Standard and Wired News (they need Jon there more than Slashdot, obviously) are being shut down or cut to the bone as funding and advertising dry up, leaving only the major media outlets to continue shoveling out the same crap they've always produced. Yahoo and the rest all rely on triple-filtered newswire trash like Reuters or Bloomberg news, which provide only the basest of information that seems to be typed up by robots.
The Internet had potential, but more and more we see the mass media outlets choking that off and turning it into just another way for the same old companies to reach people with the same information they've always provided.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
Television is not and can never be truly interactive.
The net (email, web, IM, etc.) is primarily interactive. Even if you are primarily a consumer, your consumption statistics are fed back into the system. But that is just the lowest level, of course. Many people have personal home pages, many people can contribute to weblogs, discussion groups, usenet news, email lists, etc. and their contributions are archived, responded to, and have a real impact on the future direction of information exchange.
Although Katz does not state it explicitly, this interactivity is what distinguishes the net from the old forms of media, and is one of the really cool aspects of the information flow following Sept. 11th. Slashdot, for example, experienced record levels of comments for the several articles about the distaster that were posted - often well in excess of 1000 comments!!! That just isn't possible with any other media.
And because it is still an emerging media, yes - the signal to noise ratio isn't the greatest. But mechanisms are being developed and tested to improve this.
For truly interactive education, check out Oomind:
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
I think I'm experiencing Deja Vu, because I coulda sworn I've read this article before (Ok, bored with searching, but there is more).
We get it, Jon. The net is evolving to the next stage of media. Can we talk about something else?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is just more hype about how the Net and everything appearing on it is cool and hip and important, while the dinosaur of old media is dying. It's still not true.
My main use for the Internet on September 11 was communications. I don't have a television or a radio in my office at work, so what I did was SSH into my tv-card-equipped machine at home and fire up XawTV and view screen grabs from ABC and CNN. I was on the CNN.com IRC server reading their closed-captioning server so I had a basically real time transcript to go with the pictures. I was also on EFNet talking to people. The Net allowed me to circumvent the physical barriers blocking my access to non-Net-based information, but I was still getting my news from traditional sources. Most Web-based news sites were terribly behind the curve; those that weren't were overloaded and unreachable.
As for reporting since September 11, the Net isn't that great. The only sites that are terribly informative are ones run by big media outlets. It's true that the Net allows you a much wider perspective, since you can get news from all over the world. But it's not the chaotic rumor mongering and pontification of most independent web sites which is interesting; it's the well researched and disciplined reporting that happens at major media organizations.
You argue that old media is monolithic and overly consolidated. But the Web allows you to get around that easily. It's not the independent news sites that allow this; it's the fact that every major news organization on the planet has a presence on the Web. Don't believe the New York Times? See what the South China Morning Post has to say instead.
The problem, Jon, is that you seem to believe that just because something is on the Net, it's automatically great. But most people who write on the Web aren't particularly skillful or talented or well informed; they're just people. You still need money and resources to gather news effectively. CNN and ABC News and whatnot may not be as hip and cool as LeetNews.com, but they have the resources to do the "serious" reporting. The Net is great because it makes more of this sort of information available, more quickly. But it doesn't empower anyone to suddenly become well informed and interesting.
Wash DC TV reported for several hours rumours of bombings at State Dept and other sites that were FALSE.
National TV showed virtually NO pictures of the "celebrations" in Gaza, West Bank, and other locations. And since there were no pictures, they didn't discuss WHY videos had been supressed. (Or why they're being surpressed again by the Palestinian Authority)
Consider this: How many times have you watched TV coverage of a subject you know and understand and you find yourself thinking "they're getting it wrong, that's false, they're missing it,..."?
Now think about their coverage of things you know little to nothing about.
Mass Market TV exists to sell airtime to advertisers based on estimates of the number viewers and their demographics. The news departments are under great pressure to attract viewers and their coverage reflects this. (Even small things like leaving the weather until almost the end of the 10:00 or 11:00 PM news shows.)
IF you are prepared to do your own digging and think about what you read, the Net is FAR superior to TV news. Especially for stories that require some background, require thinking about details, or lack captivating images.
Milk is not better for you than Coke, because, from an evolutionary standpoint, mammals have internal mechanisms that prevent them from properly digesting lactose after they are a certain age. It's a natural weaning process. This is discussed in most evolution/natural science college classes. The reason 30% of our population is able to digest milk is that that percentage of the population had ancestors in northern Europe who were goat herders -- those ancestors needed to be able to digest milk at any time. Yes, almost all of the people who are able to digest lots of milk at any age are white and originally from Europe.
The milk commercials, however, neglect to tell people this, and instead label the vast majority of our population "lactose intolerant", like it's some kind of disease or something. (They even sell a "cure" in the form of Lactaid and other pills!) Americans/Europeans also don't often realize that sending milk in CARE packages to other countries makes people sick more often than not.
I know this is a little offtopic, but it's an important fact that most people don't realize, and the brainwashing of those damned milk commercials doesn't help. I would also like to state that I agree with the poster's main point. The commercials for milk even prove it: TV sells you what you want to hear and not necessarily what is the truth.
i am from NJ, right outside NYC about 10 minutes from ground zero. I was in Cali 9/11. My wife called me hysterical and woke me up. We spoke for a short while and got cut off. I could not reach her by phone. I got to the office, hooked into the network and she had her IM client up. We were able to talk all that day thanks to it. We had a radio in the office and I listened to NPR while she watched CNN. We both scanned the net for news too. For news, I used every source I could get - none stood out. But the net let me keep a constant instant watch over my family from 3000 miles away and that was cool.
we speak the way we breath --Fugazi
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi